Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
requires you to finish your title by September or even August in order to make the
shelves by the holiday season.
Other publishers are more nimble, and they might be more accommodating if you
'
ve
got a AAA title coming in hot and steep as late as November. You won
t get the best
sales if you release after Thanksgiving, but even getting out the week before Christ-
mas is better than missing the season altogether. It
'
s always best to have everything in
the can before October if you want to see your game under Christmas trees.
Basically, Christmas is only merry if your game is done.
'
Microsoft Excel doesn
'
t need to support full-screen modes, and it certainly doesn
'
t
need to worry about whether the installed video card has the latest shaders. That
s
one of the reasons that games get some special dispensations from Microsoft to qual-
ify for logo compliance. Logo compliance means that your game exposes certain fea-
tures and passes quality assurance tests from Microsoft. When your game passes
muster, you are allowed to display the Windows logo on the box
'
something that is
good for any game but especially important for mass-market games.
One Microsoft game I worked on had to pass QA testing for Windows 98, Windows
ME, Windows 2000, and all versions of Windows XP. By 2002, Microsoft wasn
—
t sup-
porting Windows 95 anymore, which was a good thing. It was hard enough building
an old box for our Windows 98 test machine. The OS that required the most tweak-
ing was Windows XP, mostly because of the new requirement that the Program Files
directory was essentially read only for nonadministrator accounts. Most games store
their dynamic data files close to the executable, which will fail under Windows
XP Home. These drastic changes to Windows XP motivated many game companies
to drop support for all Windows 9x platforms by the end of 2004. For a big
company, Microsoft can move pretty fast, and as a game programmer, you have to
keep up.
The hell doesn
'
t even stop there
—
some games choose to write graphics engines that
work under DirectX and OpenGL. Some graphics middleware supports this natively,
so you don
'
t have to worry about it. Why would you bother? Performance.
Most video cards have DirectX and OpenGL drivers, but it
'
'
s not guaranteed that
you
'
ll achieve equal performance or graphics quality under both. The performance
differences are directly proportional to the effort put into the drivers, and there are
cases where the OpenGL driver beats DirectX soundly. Of course, there are mirror
cases as well, where DirectX is the way to go. Even better, the quality of the drivers
changes from operating system to operating system. The result of all this is a huge
